Net Worth: 2018-01-01

Happy New Year! If you are reading this you survived the holiday season. We hope that you made it through with no extra debt and some extra savings! Here is a great quote to wrap up the spending season!

“The quickest way to double your money is to fold it over and put it back in your pocket”

~ Will Rogers

We finished the year with our net worth up 8.6% from November and up 55.9% from January 2017. Here are our numbers to kick off 2018.

Net Worth: 2018-01-01

ASSETS

AMOUNT

% CHANGE

Cash Savings

$14,784.04

9.5%

Cash Back/Gift Cards

$1,419.78

66.4%

Brokerage/Crypto-Currency

$39,692.00

12.5%

Retirement

$460,863.42

5.4%

MOST 529

$3,577.79

6.4%

House

$303,000.00

0.0%

Cars & Boat

$49,188.00

2%

TOTAL ASSETS

$872,525.03

3.5%

LIABILITIES

AMOUNT

% CHANGE

Credit Cards

$3,686.03

8.4%

Car Loan

$21,900.00

-2.7%

HELOC

$46,000.00

2.2%

Mortgage

$193,858.74

-0.6%

Student Loans

$220,104.43

-0.1%

TOTAL LIABILITIES

$485,549.20

-0.2%

TOTAL NET WORTH

$386,975.83

8.60%

With additions two of our categories above, you should read below to learn more.

Cash Savings

If you have read along with us each month, you know this is an area where we struggled for all of 2017. Dr. SoS starting her own business and Mr. SoS taking on a new job after retiring from the old one made for a very tight year. The great thing is that we have slowly been building our cash reserves since October and plan for this to continue from now on. We are up $1,288.20 from last month in cash money!

Cash Back/Gift Cards

We use our credit cards every month for necessary purchases and pay them off nearly every week than wait for big bills at the end of the month. We are up to $1,019.78 in cash back that we can use. We will now include gift cards with our cash back. We receive gift cards from friends and family and since they cut our expenses we decided to include them in this same category. Last year, we received $250 in gift cards and did not spend them until October. This year we received $400 in gift cards and will probably save some of that to use later in the year.

Brokerage/Crypto-Currency

This is another section where we are combining instead of creating a new line item. First, my weekly Options trading was quite profitable last month. I made $267.06 after fees and commissions on my weekly options trades in addition to another $154.14 for the increase in the stock price.

The new addition to this category is an interesting one. I was speaking with a budding crypto-currency investor friend of mine and she asked if I owned any crypto. I told her I did not know much about it except that my youngest son and I tried to mine some Bitcoin (BTC) early on. After speaking with her I spoke with my son, who kept up with it and he said that Ethereum (ETH) was the next big crypto. I had $1600 that I set aside for investing. Being a former hacker, I bought $1337 worth of ETH at $443.54 each giving me +3.01442199 ETH as of December 9th. At the end of December this was worth $2,260.80. I have no idea where it is going to go from here. I may lose it all, but it is fun to watch it grow so quickly.

Retirement

Nearly all my Covered Call at the end of the month closed In The Money (ITM). When you Sell a Covered Call Option, you accept payment for the obligation to sell your shares at a set price. Closing ITM means I sold the stock at the set price. This was fine because of a couple of reasons. I am moving to more of a Value Investing strategy and needed to free up the money to buy other stocks. The other reason is I sold all these Covered Calls at a pretty handsome profit. We finished the month $23,792.52 more in our retirement than in November.

MOST 529

We deposited $150, but are up $215.33.

House

As of last month this category will stay at $303,000 until July. Curious about the wild fluctuations of estimates? Xome was $325,732. Zillow was $291,131. Average was $308,431.50. My mortgage company now includes even more fun numbers. Median sale price of houses in my area $274,000. Houses sold were 97. Houses for sale 52.

Cars & Boat

We are down $458 from November. My KIA Optima had the biggest drop of the month and our boat went up in value. Go figure.

Credit Cards

We paid nearly all our credit cards through the end of the month. Dr. SoS bought my investing books and a few other gifts in the last couple weeks, so we were up $286.03 from the previous month. Next month this number will go down for sure.

Car Loan

Only 36.5 payments or 3 years 1 months to go.

HELOC (Home Equity Line Of Credit)

Now that our stocks sold in our brokerage account we are going to put the money back in our HELOC. This will bring the balance back down. With the Federal Tax law changing where we will no longer be able to claim the interest on this account, we plan to pay this off as soon as possible in 2018.

Mortgage

Only 130 more payments or 10 years 10 months to go.

Student Loans

Minimum payments made, blah, blah, blah. The good thing is that since we lived this year basically on my retirement buy out package and my salary that we will be able to claim the interest on our taxes! Wahoo!

As of the first day of January 2018, we are up to a net worth of $386,975.83 up 8.6% from the November total of $356,345.34 and up from January 2017 total of $248,150.06. This puts us within the top 42% at 191/477 bloggers on the Rockstar Finance Directory Net Worth Tracker.

If you have any questions, please comment or send us a message on our Contact page. Thanks for reading!